Sally Haslanger is urging us all to contribute to the APA diversity fund, and to urge our colleagues to contribute! It’s currently running out of money. She suggests– as a starting place– that all US philosophers should try to get 50% of their colleagues to commit to $50 year for three years (with adjustments depending on financial situation, of course.)
The fund is here.
A few news organizations reported over the last couple of days that pro-life organizations have been excluded from official partnership with the Women’s March on Washington (e.g., here’s a piece from The Atlantic which includes interviews from folks on both sides of the issue). One pro-life group, New Wave Feminists, was recognized as a partner by the march, but then later removed.
Now, I’m not an organizer of the march, so this isn’t my decision to make. I’m not even going to the march in D.C. (though I’ll be at my local march the same day, and I encourage those who can participate to do so). Moreover, the pro-life position is at odds with the policy platform those who did organize put together. That platform reads:
We believe in Reproductive Freedom. We do not accept any federal, state or local rollbacks, cuts or restrictions on our ability to access quality reproductive healthcare services, birth control, HIV/AIDS care and prevention, or medically accurate sexuality education. This means open access to safe, legal, affordable abortion and birth control for all people, regardless of income, location or education. We understand that we can only have reproductive justice when reproductive health care is accessible to all people regardless of income, location or education.
That said, I’m a pro-choice feminist, and I think excluding pro-life groups from partnership status is a mistake. I’m grateful that some of my pro-life fellow citizens will march regardless, and I’d be glad to march alongside them.
To be clear, I think reproductive freedom is essential to women’s health and equality (and I don’t think we have to get into substantive debate about agency or the metaphysics of personhood to recognize this; banning abortion gambles with women’s lives – and that’s true even when there are meant to be exceptions for the life of the mother). I think arguments like this rely pretty straightforwardly on sexist notions (I don’t think men are some kind of depraved creatures who can only be reined in if women find within themselves to set a moral example — to live our lives in such a way as to make the potential consequences of action salient to men — and I don’t think valuing caregiving need be at odds with sexual agency nor a recognition of the value of reproductive freedom). Further, I don’t think there is intrinsic value in unity or collaboration (there’s no value added to racism, for example, when instantiated in unity with others).
But I also think that abortion is an issue on which reasonable people disagree, and in the coming years we will need reasonable people to work together given the unreasonable have taken the helm. If pro-life groups are willing to set aside that the official platform of the march directly challenges their organizing mission for the sake of working together to protect those values which we do share, then I’ll be happy to work with them. As Richard Rorty said, “Solidarity is not discovered by reflection but created.” For those of us whose conscience permits it, it’s time to be creating.
There’s a fantastic symposium over at The Brains Blog on the recent criticisms of the IAT and of implicit bias research more generally. Go check it out!
A reader writes:
Do you have any thoughts about picking your battles, feminism-wise? Do you always engage with family and extended family, even if it creates discord?
Any thoughts?
COMPASS Workshop Call for Applications
The Department of Philosophy at the University of Michigan is thrilled to announce “COMPASS at Michigan: a workshop for students considering graduate school in Philosophy.” This workshop will bring together students from a diversity of backgrounds for a weekend of philosophical discussion, networking and mentoring. Advanced undergraduates and M.A. students (first and second year) are eligible to apply.
Applicants should meet one or more of the following criteria:
– Be part of a group/demographic underrepresented in academic Philosophy
– Have demonstrated a sustained commitment to diversity in Philosophy
The Workshop will take place on September 29 and 30, 2017. Workshop participants are expected to have read in advance 4-6 papers from a range of subfields (depending in part on the interests of accepted participants). In addition to sessions discussing the papers, there will be two sessions devoted to mentoring and advice from faculty members and graduate students on graduate school applications and graduate student life.
All transportation, accommodation (Sept. 28 through Oct. 1, 2017), and food costs will be covered for the students selected. The deadline for applications is April 15, 2017, and the students selected to participate will be notified by the end of May, 2017.
To apply, please send the following documents to [email protected]
Academic statement: What is your level of studies? What areas of Philosophy interest you the most and why? What are your future plans in studying Philosophy? If you are writing a senior or MA thesis please include a brief description of it. (maximum length: 2 page double spaced)
Personal statement: Describe your experience in Philosophy as member of an underrepresented group and/or describe your sustained commitment to diversity in Philosophy. (maximum length: 2 page double spaced)
We look forward to receiving your applications.
Catarina Dutilh-Novaes on Arabic and Indian logic.
Sady Doyle has written a fantastic article, arguing that:
Political commentators parse elections in terms of the gender of candidates or voters, divide issues into “economic” and “social,” divide causes or actors into “right” and “left,” rather than considering that repressing women’s participation in public life may be its own coherent political ideology, shared by men and some (admittedly self-destructive) women across the political spectrum.
The article discusses sexism as the unifying commitment behind the arguably strange alliance of Assange, Putin and Trump. And it gives a great example of far-reaching consequences of testimonial injustice:
Of course, there was the minor detail that Assange had been arrested for the rape of two Swedish women…Which leads one to the unpleasant hypothesis that if more people had actually listened to women at the time, Assange might never have built up the credibility necessary to sway the election in the first place. And if these women had been taken seriously, the unlikely alliance of Assange, Putin, and Trump might not seem that surprising after all.
Telling myself, while I was still very angry, that it would all seem funny one day, I pulled together some of the facts of the case. First of all, some background: the rental market in Oxford, England, is stressful, to say the least. It is entirely possible to pay $1000 a week for a studio or one bedroom apartment. Such prices tend to be for short term rentals, and I decided to try for a more reasonable long term rental. Buying one of the one million-plus tiny Victorian houses in the area near my college didn’t seem a good idea.
So I found online a Great flat in exactly the right area and with a bonus view over the Oxford canal. And I used the online site to write to the letting agency, a distinguished and established one. In effect, I sent them an inquiry connected to a female name from a person in Houston, TX.
The next thing I know, I received a fairly long list of questions, including ones about visas, pets and children. I do wish I had stopped there. I should have just said, let’s decide on the details of the lease and I can answer these later before everything is finalized.
Foolishly, I answered them. Clearly not a careful reader, the realtor misunderstood my response and concluded that I wasn’t really interested in renting. And a week after my inquiry he tells me that someone else has made an offer that they are accepting.
So what happened? Despite my experience as a feminist in philosophy, I was at first inclined to think he just was a not very bright young man. But suddenly I remembered what can be the point of introducing a list of distractors. At the very least, it delays things so that the candidate doesn’t get full treatment and some ‘more acceptable’ alternative can be found. It also takes the proceedings more or less out of the control of the candidate.
Who knows what was really going on? At least, it could have been much, much worse. As the Guardian has pointed out, some London landlords are demanding sex for a lease.
The Chronicle of Higher Ed has an article on implicit bias which raises questions a number of philosophers have pursued. The general question is about the relation between implicit bias and biased behavior, with specific reference to the IAT (Implicit Association Test). The conclusion that is emerging is that getting rid of implicit biases will not get rid of the biased behavior. The point is made that from the fact that bias causes biased behavior, it does not follow that getting rid of bias gets rid of the behavior.
While that sounds true, we should know more. One reason could have to do with what ‘implicit bias in a person’ really is. Edward Machery has a lot of work on this question. But in general we have known for sometime that that beliefs tend to occur in networks, and changing the belief in one network may leave it more or less intact in another part. Another could be that the biased actions or their results are held in place by structural factors in the society. I am not sure who all have pursued this line of investigation, but Sally Haslanger has a lot of excellent work in this area. In my contribution to the 2-volume OUP work on implicit bias edited by Brownstein and Saul, I raised a question about this, and look at some recent psychological literature. Once one starts to look at the structural factors underpinning racist actions, for example, one can see that the needed change has got at least to include a change in social structures. (You can find a good article by Machery in the same 2-vol edition. Google will reveal lots of work by Haslanger.)
It would be great to get more reading suggestions on the structural side in the comments.
For people who have been following this literature at all closely, one of the biggest surprises is that one of the originators of the supposedly fundamental IAT seems to have changed sides! That’s Brian Nozick of the University of VA.
Query from a reader (lightly edited):
I am interested in the fact that in patriarchal societies certain ways of communicating/arguing are deemed inferior. Obvious displays of emotion, hedging and asking questions as an oblique way of making a point are all thought to be undesirable and unhelpful, for example.
I know there is a lot of discussion among activist communities of ‘tone policing’, but I wondered if there are any explicitly philosophical texts identifying or analysing this problem. I am already very familiar with Miranda Fricker’s work, but wondered if there are any other resources you could point me to? (They definitely do not have to be related to gendered communicative styles specifically.)
Do leave suggestions in comments!
